The Republican National Convention in Tampa brought fresh reminders that even carefully choreographed political events don’t always go according to plan.

Hurricane Isaac threatened to cancel the whole affair, Ron Paul supporters stirred up trouble on the convention floor — and Clint Eastwood stole headlines from Mitt Romney by conducting a rambling interview with an imaginary President Barack Obama.

Here are POLITICO’s five potential landmines facing Obama and Democrats as they gather in Charlotte.

Hurricane Bill

Bill Clinton is starring in a new Obama campaign TV ad, but he’s made it clear in the past he doesn’t take his talking points from the Obama campaign — he’s even said so explicitly.

Clinton’s got a prime-time speaking slot on Wednesday night, but Charlotte will be full of chances for him to freelance on camera or speak just a bit too candidly about Obama. Republicans will be ready to pounce on Clinton if he credits himself instead of Obama for positives, or expresses doubts about an Obama proposal. And then there’s the possibility Clinton could suggest support for a Republican plan, like he seemed to in June regarding the competing proposals over extending the Bush tax cuts.

Already, Romney’s campaign has sought to stoke the old divide between the Obama and Clinton camps by pouncing on every Clinton statement remotely praising Romney. They’ve used a graphic featuring a red-faced Hillary Clinton with the words “Shame on you, Barack Obama” from her infamous 2008 press conference, and last week it launched a website commemorating Clinton’s comment, noting Romney’s “sterling business career.”

“Obviously, President Clinton has extraordinary credibility on these issues of how [to] build a strong economy,” a senior Obama campaign adviser said. “He faced some of the same forces when he was president that President Obama is facing now, the same opposition to dealing with a fiscal challenge by asking the wealthy to pay a little more. We believe he’s an important messenger and, obviously, he’s going to play a significant role in our convention and beyond our convention.”

Rebuilding “You didn’t build that”

Republicans built a whole night in Tampa around rebutting Obama’s “You didn’t build that” line. Democrats are putting in prime time the woman from whom Obama cribbed the line.

That’s not the only potential trouble from Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat and the woman who headed the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Harvard Law professor is a political novice who will be making her debut on the national stage. And even though she’ll be in Charlotte to pump up the president, her main focus will be her own election prospects, and what plays in Massachusetts — and to the Daily Kos crowd — isn’t always what moves moderates around the rest of the country.

As candidates like Todd Akin and George Allen know, it takes only one on-camera slip-up to cause a fatal distraction. But Warren poses a special risk for Obama: Will she handle the flood of interviews without hijacking Obama’s message to middle-class voters or alienating what remaining Wall Street donors the campaign still counts as friends?

That’s not even getting into how Warren would respond to questions about her shaky campaign rollout, which for weeks was distracted by her claims of Native American heritage.

Actual class warfare

The Occupy Wall Street movement largely died out in the public eye after police departments, particularly in New York, forced them to abandon the public spaces they’d occupied.

Still, a ragtag group of anti-capitalist protestors are aiming to make noise at the Democratic convention, which could include protests out on the streets and flare-ups on the convention floor during the main speeches.

“Definitely more energy has gone into criticizing Democrats because the failure of the Obama administration is what in a sense gave rise to Occupy,” said Michael Levitin, the editor of The Occupied Wall Street Journal. “Protesting at that convention is a given. But the crackdown by Democratic mayors across the country and, I think, the massive amount of security state that’s developed around Charlotte show the lack of receptivity from the Democratic establishment.”

There’s also the danger of speakers or delegates going off the Obama campaign’s all-for-the-middle-class script. Opportunities abound, from repeating the summer’s initial criticism of the campaign’s attacks on Bain Capital by some prominent Democrats to off-message adventures from anti-war protestors or unwanted critiques of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith.

The Obama campaign insists it doesn’t foresee any trouble keeping the convention’s three days within pre-approved lines.

“We’re talking to governors, senators, representatives, people who are not publicly elected officials, CEOs,” the senior campaign official said. “And no one has really expressed an interest in talking about anything other than what is at the heart of this campaign, which is, what the middle class is fighting for, struggling for, the challenges we face and how to get out of it.”

Not a sell-out audience

The Obama campaign drew 14,000 people to Ohio State University’s basketball arena for the campaign kickoff in May.

The problem was, the arena seated 18,000. News reports were full of stories of college students being frantically recruited to fill the rest and a photo of the empty upper deck led the Drudge Report.

Like in 2008, the Obama team is shifting venues for his speech on the final night. And that only means more potential opportunities for cutaways and live shots of reporters standing in a section of empty seats to distract cable TV viewers from what’s going on at the podium at Bank of America Stadium.

Or worse: With North Carolina Democrats giving away tickets to anyone who asks, Obama could find himself speaking to sections of Republican hecklers or other protestors, aiming to disrupt his big moment.

In recent months, Obama’s campaign has been pushing tickets on North Carolinians. Before a Joe Biden rally in Durham Aug. 13, organizers offered convention tickets for a mere nine hours of campaigning. Two weeks later, the campaign was offering tickets to anyone who asked and stopped by one of Team Obama’s offices. There was little vetting who could score a ticket — a state GOP operative who signed up online with his real name said he received a phone call inviting him to pick up his ticket at a Charlotte office.

At a recent background briefing with reporters, six senior Obama campaign officials pointedly declined to predict, when asked, if the president will look out at a full house when he formally accepts his party’s nomination. Instead, one adviser touted the campaign’s ability to receive contributions via text message and another described the milieu of people who will appear onstage.

“We don’t think we’re going to have turnout problems,” was as close as any of them came to predicting a full house.

Can Charlotte cut it?

There aren’t enough cabs. There aren’t enough hotels, and the ones they do have are too far from the convention site. The biggest tourist attractions are the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The airport, though a major US Airways hub, is dank and dreary.

Charlotte is the smallest metropolitan area to host a major party convention since the 1988 RNC in New Orleans — and just on the precipice of cities large enough to stage such a major event. That’s clear from the hopeful branding campaign of the region’s convention and visitors bureau — “Charlotte’s Got a Lot” — to the city’s relative lack of hotel rooms. There are 15,000 hotel rooms within 30 minutes of the arena and stadium, a fraction of what is necessary to hold the 40,000 people expected to converge.

And that’s not to mention a lack of union buy-in, a smaller corporate footprint, given the Obama campaign’s ban on corporate giving to the convention – which will result in fewer big parties — and unprecedented traffic issues for convention-goers spread across the region.

Bill Ritter, who was the Colorado governor when Democrats met in Denver — a city of similar capacity to Charlotte before its convention preparations — said his city would never have been considered as a DNC host before 2008 because it didn’t have sufficient hotel space.

In addition to the heavy car traffic, Ritter said his biggest regret was the security that left some people still waiting to get through magnetometers when Obama began his convention speech at Denver’s football stadium.

“The lines were too long, and even with security foremost in their mind, there has to be a way to move those lines more quickly so no one is left outside listening,” he said.

Plus, there’s no roof at the Bank of America Stadium — and some forecasts call for rain.